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Founder Of a Center For New Art Steps Aside

After years of tumult and controversy, Marcia Tucker has announced that she will step aside as director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, which she founded 21 years ago as a focus for recent work by living artists.

She has told her staff that the museum board will start looking for a new director immediately and that she will become founding director ''as soon as it is expedient.'' She will fully retire from the museum by the summer of 2000, she said.

''I've said over and over again that founding directors of entrepreneurial institutions stay too long, and I never wanted to do that,'' Ms. Tucker said in an interview. She said she and the board had discussed the succession for at least seven years.

But donors and board members have grown increasingly restive as the museum, which began as a trail-blazer for the avant-garde, came under repeated fire as a funky emblem of another time.

The issue ''is Marcia's contemporaneity,'' said Arthur Goldberg, an investment manager who was on the board from 1982 until 1996. ''I don't know how many directors of contemporary museums stay in position for 20 years.''

Ms. Tucker's announcement comes at a crucial moment for the institution. On Thursday, the museum reopens with its space expanded from 23,000 to 30,000 square feet, new second-floor galleries and a multilevel lobby that reconfigures what once were basement offices. A restructured board started a $6 million capital campaign, two-thirds of which has already been raised. After months of visa entanglements, the Cuban critic Geraldo Mosquera will begin commuting from Havana to New York in April to take up his duties as a curator. The new senior curator, Dan Cameron, has been in place for two years and has mounted four well-received exhibitions.

''I can hand this organization over feeling I am giving somebody something whole, not damaged,'' Ms. Tucker, who turns 58 next month, said. ''The important thing is that somebody can take the organization some place that I couldn't.''

But currents of friction over the direction of the institution have sometimes risen to the surface. Mr. Cameron contended that although Ms. Tucker was ''showing her support by letting me do my job,'' it was not she but the board that hired him and sent ''a very strong signal that it was looking for new leadership and guidance in its exhibitions.''

Not so, said Ms. Tucker: ''Only the director has the ability to hire, but I consulted with a handful of board members.'' Manuel Gonzalez, a board member who is executive director of the art program at Chase Manhattan Bank, described Mr. Cameron as the institution's great hope and added that the buzzword was ''global.''

After nearly a decade of theme shows in which the subjects often upstaged the art, the museum will be highlighting work this year by artists from Cameroon, Cuba, Brazil, Germany and China.

''It was becoming a provincial institution for a provincial New York, and now it is becoming a more international player,'' Mr. Gonzalez said.

While the museum has struggled with its identity, the contemporary art world has changed as well. The Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dia Center for the Arts, P.S. 1 and Exit Art have entered ground that Ms. Tucker initially had to herself. And the avant-garde that once shared her antagonism to the status quo is now busy working the international art circuit.

From the start the museum was staunchly anti-star-system, anti-marketplace and against the museum as a ''top-down purveyor of high culture, taste and knowledge,'' as she once wrote.

At the Whitney, where she was curator of painting and sculpture from 1969 to 1977, she organized prophetic exhibitions for two female painters, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell, and for such Conceptual artists as Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle. Her choices came under attack and Ms. Tucker was dismissed. She immediately created her own museum, which opened in 1977 and moved to its current building in 1983.

She conceived a nonhierarchical structure in which everyone would share jobs for equal pay, decisions would be collaborative, the collection would be temporary and the museum would be in a perpetual state of self-criticism. Most of those ideals did not survive the test of practicality, but group decision-making prevailed, often through meetings described by some participants as harrowing.

Still, such New Museum practices as team management and audience-friendly strategies are being adopted by more mainstream museums. The institution has been a training ground for a generation of curators.

But all through the 1980's, while the galleries were celebrating big painting, the New Museum, with its fixation on art on the margins, appeared to be out of step. It became, Mr. Gonzalez said, ''a museum for the underdog.''

In retrospect, a disproportionate number of shows were prescient. The museum mounted exhibitions of artists outside New York, gay artists, members of radical Hispanic and feminist organizations, the politically charged work of Leon Golub, the socioeconomic investigations of Hans Haacke and the Holocaust reveries of Christian Boltanski.

But by 1993 the museum was running a deficit, and the building at 583 Broadway deteriorated after its owner went bankrupt. Staff members filed a $400 million lawsuit after several of them said they had become ill because of a toxic fungus that grew in the basement where they worked.

The board, which had agreed to keep its hands off the exhibition program, complained and changed its policy after a series of heavily criticized theme shows involving social scientists and anthropologists, Mr. Goldberg said. In the summer of 1996, board and staff members held a retreat, beginning a process that produced a new mission statement, the new global direction and a new board policy calling for an annual evaluation of the director.

William V. Kreigel, a developer, bought the building, renovated the top floors and contributed $2.3 million to the capital campaign, making the renovation possible. What Ms. Tucker has accomplished, Mr. Gonzalez said, ''is that the museum will survive her.''